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6 - THE SACRED, RELIGIOUS, AND SECULAR IN CONTENTIOUS POLITICS: BLURRING BOUNDARIES
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- By Ron Aminzade, University of Minnesota, Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University
- Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis, Doug McAdam, Stanford University, California, Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University, Massachusetts, William H. Sewell, University of Chicago, Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University, New York, Charles Tilley
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- Book:
- Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2001, pp 155-178
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Summary
Introduction: Religion and Politics
Theories of social movements have been built, for the most part, from studies of western democracies in which the differentiation of secular and religious institutions and norms is unusually pronounced. The result of focusing on such secularized societies has been a tendency to see religions as furnishing social movements with organizational (and occasionally ideological) resources – but little more. Thus scholars have often emphasized ways in which churches serve as mobilizing networks, and have sometimes also noted the importance of religious beliefs and symbols as a source of collective action framing. Less frequently, however, have they ventured beyond a purely instrumentalist perspective to explore the expressive dimensions of religious conviction in processes of contention.
In this chapter our focus is on cases drawn from Chinese and African societies that have diverged from the secularized path of change in the West. China (in both its communist and precommunist incarnations) has not institutionalized the sort of church-state separation and attendant freedoms of religion that are taken as hallmarks of liberal democratic polities. In Africa, even where institutional differentiation and religious freedom are evident, popular beliefs about other-worldly entities and sacred legitimations of secular authority continue to inform routine and nonroutine politics. The reasons for these distinctive patterns of church-state relations and belief systems need not concern us here, but one result is that the intersection of religion and politics assumes quite different – and in some respects more transparent – consequences in our cases than may be evident in many western democracies.
2 - EMOTIONS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS
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- By Ron Aminzade, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Doug McAdam, Stanford University
- Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis, Doug McAdam, Stanford University, California, Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University, Massachusetts, William H. Sewell, University of Chicago, Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University, New York, Charles Tilley
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- Book:
- Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2001, pp 14-50
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Summary
In all fields of study, dominant theoretical perspectives tend to obscure as much as they reveal. By highlighting specific dimensions of complex empirical phenomena, leading paradigms render other aspects of these same phenomena more or less invisible to scholars. This is no less true of the study of contentious politics than it is of other fields of inquiry. Focusing only on the more narrow literature on social movements, we find that the recent dominance of what might be termed “structural environmental” perspectives (for example, resource mobilization, political process, and so on) has tended to focus attention on the environmental facilitation or suppression of movement activity rather than on internal characteristics or dynamics of the movements themselves.
In this chapter we want to take up one especially notable “silence” in the social movement literature as it pertains to internal movement dynamics. We are referring to the mobilization of emotions as a necessary and exceedingly important component of any significant instance of collective action. Our aims in this regard are modest. Given the lack of systematic work in this area, we hope simply to: (1) Highlight this “silence” for other researchers; (2) parse the literature on the sociology of emotions for insights relevant to the study of social movements; and, (3) in a nonsystematic way, describe, what to us, seem like some of the critically important aggregate level emotional processes/dynamics that shape the ebb and flow of protest activity.
5 - LEADERSHIP DYNAMICS AND DYNAMICS OF CONTENTION
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- By Ron Aminzade, University of Minnesota, Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University
- Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis, Doug McAdam, Stanford University, California, Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University, Massachusetts, William H. Sewell, University of Chicago, Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University, New York, Charles Tilley
-
- Book:
- Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2001, pp 126-154
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- Chapter
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Summary
Leadership is one of the most extensively researched topics in psychology and organization studies (Rosenbach and Taylor 1993; Sashkin and Lassey 1983). A focus on leadership as the wellspring of political action is found in Carlyle (1849), Freud (1965), Lasswell (1948), and Weber (1954), among many others. Despite this vast outpouring of scholarship, most research has focused on explaining leadership itself, rather than on its effects. That is, the bulk of scholarship is devoted to describing what kind of person (in terms of background or personal characteristics) becomes a leader (Mazlish 1976; Rejai and Phillips 1979), the various types of leadership (Sashkin and Rosenbach 1993; Weber 1954), the situations in which leadership emerges (Burns 1978), the relations between leaders and followers (Fiedler 1967), and the detailed lives or psychohistories of individual leaders (Erikson 1962; 1969; Wolfenstein 1967). Surprisingly little scholarship, particularly in regard to social movements and revolutions, has sought to determine the effect that variation in leadership dynamics – that is, in the relationships among revolutionary leaders, or between leaders and followers – have on the course and outcomes of contentious politics.
There are three main perspectives on the effect of leadership dynamics on movement dynamics in the classic sociological literature: the circulation of elites (Pareto), the tendency to oligarchy of elites (Michels), and the need to rationalize or institutionalize charismatic leadership (Weber). All are surprisingly negative in assessing the potential for revolutionary leadership to make a significant difference.
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